Sergeant Pepper's wild trip

By James Button, London

2 June 2007 — 10:00am

IT WAS 40 years ago today that the Beatles put out Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. With its orchestral arrangements, trace of eastern rhythms, collage art and reported inspiration in LSD, the album is said to be the most influential rock record of all time. Newsweek compared it to The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot. Critic Kenneth Tynan extravagantly called it "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation".

But claims that Sergeant Pepper fathered hippies, psychedelia, progressive rock or the 1967 Summer of Love surely miss the point. The album is about something both more ordinary and more weird: England.

It is an England of brass bands, fun fairs and music halls; double-decker buses, home maintenance and holidays by the sea; rain, of course, and cups of tea. It is an England that is timeless and caught at a distinct moment in time, as the old ticks over to the new, lords and armies lose their grip on the land and a girl runs away from home to meet a man from the motor trade. It is England at a precise point in the lives of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, whose highly competitive partnership reaches its creative peak on Sergeant Pepper, before the bitter slide towards separation.

Advertisement

The Beatles recorded the album between December 1966 and April 1967. In that time they also recorded Strawberry Fields, written by Lennon, and McCartney's Penny Lane. Yet producer George Martin left the two songs off Sergeant Pepper, a decision he says he regrets to this day. With the 13 on the album and I Am the Walrus, which Lennon wrote in September 1967, they form the only body of Beatles work that conveys a spirit of the place that made them.

The early days, their yeah-yeah-yeah period, were all placeless love songs, Paperback Writer being a rare exception. The very English Eleanor Rigby lives and dies on Revolver, the record before Sergeant Pepper, and George Harrison complains about the government's revenue collection policies in Taxman. But that is all.

After Sergeant Pepper, the break-up is looming. They mostly write separately. Lennon's lyrics are harder, often focused on politics; Harrison turns eastwards. The themes of Sergeant Pepper are gone. In their whole career is one nine-month burst of songs of home. What accounts for this brief, brilliant dream of England?

In August 1966, the Beatles played their last live concert, in San Francisco. After three years of almost constant touring, they were fed up with not being able to hear themselves above the screams. They had been hounded out of the Philippines, fearing for their lives, after allegedly insulting Imelda Marcos. Their records were being burnt across the United States after Lennon had said they were more popular than Jesus. They were exhausted and disillusioned; they wanted to hide. McCartney proposed that on their next record they take alter egos. On the plane back from America, Harrison said: "That's it. I'm finished. I'm not a Beatle any more."

Sergeant Pepper, then, was the record they made after they went home and saw it as if for the first time. Except, of course, that England in 1966 was hardly the world of Sergeant Pepper and his band. The looking glass points backwards: Penny Lane is the suburban junction where Lennon and McCartney would meet as teenagers before taking the bus into Liverpool. Strawberry Fields is a children's home near where Lennon lived as a boy. The songs Getting Better and Good Morning contain fragments of unhappy school days. With time on their hands, Lennon and McCartney found their minds free to wander, to drift into the past.

Lennon and his wife, Cynthia, had bought a mock-Tudor mansion in Surrey. He was determined to see more of his three-year-old son, Julian. But family life was an ordeal: he took drugs nearly every day and was "unconnected, moody, distant and unpredictable", Cynthia Lennon wrote in her 2005 biography, John. In November, he met Yoko Ono at an exhibition she held in London. She reportedly passed him a card that said, "Breathe." It was a turbulent time, out of which he would write some of his best music.

McCartney, meanwhile, kept tinkering with music-hall comedy, the sort of tunes his father used to play to him on piano. Sergeant Pepper is in many ways McCartney's album, yet Lennon's role, though secondary, is crucial. Without it the record may not have risen beyond old-fashioned melody and cheery whimsy.

It is Lennon who slips in the euphoric sigh at the start of Lovely Rita, and the wife-beating verse in Getting Better, and the line, "It couldn't get much worse." As McCartney's brass band marches merrily down the street, Lennon is lost in the bending mirrors, swirling apparitions and glass-eyed dolls of the fun fair. "Don't you think the joker laughs at you — ha ha!" If ever the Beatles got too sweet, it was Lennon who supplied the necessary, off-key note.

"The Hendersons will all be there, late of Pablo Fanques Fair" — he took the words of For the Benefit of Mr Kite verbatim from a Victorian circus poster he found while rifling through an antique shop in Kent. The song is so narcotic and trance-like that Beatles detectives hunting for meaning assumed Mr Kite flying high, or Henry the Horse dancing the waltz, was code for heroin. No, said Lennon, they were just words on the poster.

Similarly, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was not LSD but the name of one of Julian's drawings. It was hard to believe, especially since Lewis Carroll, to whom Lucy in the Sky pays homage, was an opium smoker. But, Lennon said, drugs only open what is already in the mind. The boat drifts down the river, past rocking-horse people and flowers that grow incredibly high. Shapes are distorted, plasticine porters come to life, the sky is made of marmalade. It is a hallucination of an English childhood.

More than any other song on the record, Lucy in the Sky was said to have inspired the hippy movement. But as historian Dominic Sandbrook shows in two recent books on the 1960s, few Britons were touched by flower power, free love and swinging London. The country was getting richer, but two-thirds of people still saw themselves as working class, half lived in housing estates and barely more than a

third owned cars, which is why the man from the motor trade had such spivvy glamour. The soundtracks of South Pacific and The Sound of Music easily outsold any Beatles album.

The '60s, though, would change Britain as they changed other places. But not yet: on Sergeant Pepper Lennon and McCartney steep themselves in the lower-middle-class world they knew as children. It was a world where an elderly couple might rent a cottage on the Isle of Wight if it's not too dear; where a man woos a working girl by taking tea with her on a sofa, chaperoned by a sister or two. As soon as Harrison finishes philosophising on Within You, Without You, his sitar is chased away by McCartney's clarinet and his homespun, "When I get older, losing my hair …" We've ditched the Maharishi and are back in Maidenhead.

In this way Sergeant Pepper goes against the grain of most pop music. Rock stars are by definition upwardly mobile. At first, they embody the spirit of the streets and town they come from. But as they get famous, they lose that connection. Feted, harassed, living in hotels, they inhabit a surreal world in which only the best retain the ability to make good music.

In 1966 and 1967, Lennon and McCartney, having rarely written about local life, write about it all the time. The drift of Sergeant Pepper is downwards, into domesticity and respectability, but with a hint of something repressed behind it.

EVEN McCartney catches it. Penny Lane is a sepia photograph of settled, decent vanishing England. The nurse sells remembrance poppies, the fireman carries a portrait of the Queen. But as the barber shaves another customer and the banker waits for a trim, "the fireman rushes in, from the pouring rain, very strange". Something is amiss … what is it?

It is English weirdness — born, as always, in the tight conformity of ordinary life. It is Alice reading on the river bank before she goes down the rabbit hole; Mole throwing in his spring cleaning to tunnel up to the river bank and the wide world. It is the hobbit in his home in the Shire before the dwarves and wizard come knocking. It is Tory MPs dressed in women's underwear, and the mother of Sex Pistols guitarist Glen Matlock complaining of the shame of her name being associated with that filthy band: "The girls at the Gas Board are all calling me Mrs Sex Pistol."

During the time of Sergeant Pepper, Lennon was reading The Daily Mail, the sour voice of middle England. The heir to the Guinness fortune had killed himself in a car crash. On the next page was a story about the need to fill 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. "I read the news today, oh boy" — Lennon wrote in A Day in the Life with The Daily Mail open beside him on the piano.

Who knows what the song means? The artist makes images, the audience imagines. Old England is breaking down, the lights have changed. Nobody knows or cares if the dead man is from the House of Lords. The English army wins the war; people turn away. Two years later, Lennon will return his MBE in protest against Britain's support for the Vietnam War.

It is his song, yet the vital middle verse is McCartney's: the alarm clock of his common man shatters Lennon's fantasy. McCartney said the words were a memory of school days. But it might equally be a middle-aged bank clerk, comb dragged across his head to keep his thinning hair in place. Cup, coat, hat … no time to think until he climbs to the bus's top deck and has a smoke "and somebody spoke and I went into a dream".

Is it Afghan hash? More likely a Woodbine. The music soars over the red post boxes and neat, wet streets, but the words are plain: a lonely heart dreams of love. It is McCartney who writes the hesitant, yearning line, in which the riot of the '60s is locked up inside English reserve: "I'd love to turn you on." If A Day in the Life is Lennon and McCartney's greatest song, it is because their competing visions perfectly meshed. They never would again.

In 1969 McCartney married an American, Linda Eastman. But he stayed in England. Even at the age of 64, a bitter divorce with his second wife in train and no sign of the old age by the fireside he once imagined, he retains the chipper goodwill that so endears him to his countryfolk.

Lennon married Yoko Ono and became John Winston Ono Lennon, the middle names catching the ambivalence he felt for his home. Three years later he left it for virtual exile in New York, and would never return, or write about it again. Sergeant Pepper is his last, bittersweet ode to England.

Or maybe not. Maybe it's just a bunch of songs. Whole lives have been wasted trying to divine messages in Beatles songs, playing records backwards and all that. But as Lennon later sang, "here's another clue for you all". In the album artwork the four appear as members of the band and as Madame Tussauds waxworks, frozen figurines, English kitsch. In the inside photo, Lennon has stitched onto his sleeve, mockingly or fondly, the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom.